Through economic growth, mergers and acquisitions, business enterprises are becoming ever larger. Further, large business enterprises in the field of high technology now offer ever larger numbers of products and services that derive from an increasingly large variety of technologies.
In this environment, managing the categorization, creation, use, and maintenance of the company's intellectual assets, such as products and technologies is an acute problem. As an enterprise grows, maintaining consistent usage of names of products and services, and other types of company data, throughout the enterprise becomes even more challenging. When an enterprise derives its business opportunities from research and development into new technologies or improvements of existing technologies, maintaining consistent categorization and usage of technology designations is a challenge, especially when there is disagreement or confusion about the uses, advantages or benefits of a particular technology. Such confusion can arise whether disagreements arise or not, as when there is no communication between different teams within an enterprise.
The World Wide Web is one communication medium that exacerbates the problem, by showing internal information to the enterprise's partners and customers. Large enterprises that own or operate complex Web sites or other network resources that contain product and technology information face a related problem. Specifically, ensuring consistent usage of product names and technology terms across a large, complicated Web site is problematic. A particular problem involves maintaining consistent use of terms when different parts or elements of the Web site applications are created or content is authored by different individuals or groups.
Yet another problem in this context pertains to retrieving product information and technology information. Visitors to the large enterprise Web site do not necessarily know the “official” name of a product or technology. As a result, new visitors tend to query the Web site for product information based on incorrect terms, imprecise terms, related terms, or names that are unofficial. When a visitor searches using the wrong product name, the visitor is unable to retrieve quality product information, and the visitor may become frustrated. However, this is undesirable from a promotional standpoint; the customer should be able to issue a “wrong” query and yet still retrieve the correct information.
Based on the foregoing, there is a clear need for improved ways to categorize, represent, describe and manage one or more vocabularies of all company business practices and pertaining to all business terminology (“concept”), including but not limited to product names and technology terms. In particular, there is a need for a way to categorize, structure information so that it can be located and navigated easily. There is also a need for a way to share and propagate changes to name and vocabulary information.
There is a specific need for a clear and consistent way to develop new brands, trademarks, names for solutions or services, etc., that promotes consistency in terminology, style and presentation.
There is a need for a way to deliver information that is relevant to a user query in response to non-standard or alternative terms.
There is also a need for a simple, automated, unified and consistent way to manage usage of product names and technology terms in business documents, applications, and online resources such as Web sites.
There is also a need for a management system based on data and rules that can control processes through which new terminology representing business concepts is created, control the format and style of the names, and manage development of names and designations of relationships by expert or interested individuals who are distributed among many groups of a large enterprise, or who are outside the enterprise.
There is also need for a system that is extensible or adaptable when new business practices, products or technologies are developed by diverse, distributed groups in a large business enterprise.